It is
not generally possible to turn off garbage collection. However, the garbage collector won’t run
unless “provoked.” Garbage collection
is triggered by:
1)
Allocation
2)
Explicit calls by the application to
System.GC.Collect
3)
Explicit calls by the application to services that implicitly
trigger a GC. For example,
unloading an AppDomain will trigger at least one full
GC.
4)
On some operating systems, low memory notifications to the
application might cause the garbage collector to run. This is true of recent versions of
Windows.
Sometimes when developers want to turn off the garbage collector,
they really want to turn off the Finalizer thread. This thread runs asynchronously to the
application and at a high priority.
If the application has a time window where it doesn’t want the Finalizer
thread to intrude, one approach is to drain the finalizer queue before starting
this time-critical operation. The
queue can be drained by calling
GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers().
Of
course, this doesn't actually turn off finalization. But it does create a
window where finalization is far less likely to intrude on your
application.
